March 28, 2024

Kindness of others

Relying on the kindness of others is hard to do sometimes. Because of this, I have a difficult time asking for help. I believe most things I have to get accomplished can be done so by myself without burdening someone else with my problems.

I do ask for help; I’m not a complete control freak. However, these seem to be small scale requests. I can ask someone to bring me something, request help finding something I need or things of that nature. I communicate with my fiancé, Tim, when I need help with household chores or errands and vice versa. It’s the big requests I stubbornly try to avoid. Tim is the same way.

In the process of moving, he has had to request assistance from both my family and his to take in our pets and store some of his larger items that won’t fit at the apartment.

I have mentioned in a previous column that Tim is a “car guy.” He likes to work on cars when he can find the time and has several vehicles, and most of them run and drive. He also has a car trailer, a camper and a boat (on its own trailer). Living in an apartment doesn’t allow him a garage or enough parking space to store all of these. We have been house hunting, but our goal remains to get Tim’s sold before we buy a house for the two of us. Now that it’s winter and the wedding is on the horizon, we will pick up the house hunt after the honeymoon. Therefore, Tim has had to find suitable parking places for all of these larger items.

Like me, he hates to feel like he’s burdening anyone. With that being said, we both have awesome families who are kind enough to let us rely on their kindness as we live in transition.

His parents offered to let him park the camper at their house. Luckily, it was before any significant snow fall, so we were able to get that settled into its parking place without having to deal with the cold or snow drifts. My parents agreed to let us make use of their spare garage to park one of Tim’s cars and his lawn mowers, and things like that. Tim and I are fortunate that our parents have the additional space and allowed us to make use it.

However, that still left us with the car trailer, the boat and Tim’s work truck. Both Tim and I were trying to figure out places he could try to store these, without him having to rent another storage unit or two. I don’t know what made me suggest it, but I thought we could ask my Grandma if we could find a place on her farm to park the items.

Grandma was, of course, more than happy to let Tim store his stuff in her unused machine shed. The only problem being a fair amount of junk and scrap items had collected in the stalls due to its non-use. Well, Tim and I scoped out the two stalls and determined if we moved the junk from the middle stall to the one next to it, there should be enough clearance to get the car trailer and boat trailer in the building with the truck parked outside somewhere.

We chose the first weekend of January and one of the coldest weekends in recent memory to get this accomplished. With a lot of teamwork, we got the stall cleared out in about 45 minutes, much to the surprise of my grandmother.

When we returned with the trailers, my cousin and uncle were at the farm to do chores. Both said they would have come and helped us, if we had let them know we were coming that day. We knew they would help, but again we didn’t want to ask too much of people. The offer was touching nonetheless. Both trailers fit in the shed and a suitable parking place was found for the truck. Tim was very happy to have it all taken care of.

The kindness of our families never ceases to humble me. I feel incredibly blessed to be surrounded by such wonderful people. The kindness of others can be a beautiful thing.

Contact Pam Rodgers at
prodgers@newtondailynews.com